Friday, 24 January 2014

A Leader column in this week's Economist magazine argues that 'safe roads make better economic sense than dangerous ones. Most crash victims are boys and working-age men. Their death or maiming leaves families destitute and deprives countries of their most economically valuable citizens.' The Economist also publishes an article highlighting the impact of road crashes in middle and low income countries.

Thursday, 9 January 2014

Governments at the UN have been urged to include a road safety target within the 'post-2015' framework for sustainable development. At a 'Open Working Group' hearing chaired by the UN Ambassadors of Kenya and Hungary, Saul Billingsley, Director of the Road Safety Fund, called on the international community to recognise the contribution that road safety and sustainable transport can make to delivering wider goals for health, education and economic development:

“There is a fundamental, and often fatal, disconnect when transport efficiency is calculated only according to narrow economic criteria. When it forgets or neglects the human dimension. An all too typical example is road building and rehabilitation designed to increase vehicle volume and speed, without considering the wider or long-term safety or environmental impacts. So our objective for the post-2015 agenda should be to restore the human dimension to transport policy, to design transport systems that do no harm, and to integrate transport policies with wider development objectives in a way that supports the delivery of the new sustainable development goals.”

A briefing paper for the hearings published by a number of UN agencies, including UNEP, WHO and UNECE, calls for a post-2015 target for road safety to reduce fatalities by 50% from 2010 levels by 2030. A paper prepared by the Partnership for Sustainable Low Carbon Transport (SLoCaT) provides some detailed suggestions for how a road safety target, and the indicators to support it, could be formulated.